Briefly Noted

Carnival, by Rawi Hage (Norton)Brought up in the circus, by “the loving nature of freaks,” the protagonist of this dreamlike tale is a voracious reader by day and a taxi-driver by night. He goes by the name of Fly, and cruises the crime-ridden streets of a nameless city at carnival time. He encounters a sequence of strangers, some of whom make several appearances, while others pay their fare and vanish into the night. “I am a wanderer,” he informs the reader early on. Fly is a kind of flâneur, and his story is a meditation on a drifting life. Sights are insignificant to Hage; what matters are people and their stories. “I and the likes of me are the carriers of this world, the movers and the linkers,” Fly says. Despite the dreariness of a world from which daylight is shut out, the reader wants to buckle up and join him for the ride.

The First Rule of Swimming, by Courtney Angela Brkic (Little, Brown)In this suspenseful début, the romantic simplicity of Rosmarina, a small island modelled on those off the coast of Croatia, belies the region’s violent political history. When Magdalena’s younger sister disappears in New York, she leaves the island to find her. In nonlinear vignettes, Brkic traces three generations of family history, revealing the wounds of war, exile, and betrayal. The revelations are well paced, and Brkic deftly walks the line between the sentimental and the intimate. The novel draws its narrative force from the characters’ desire to protect family and to survive at all costs, even if doing so means letting secrets “belong only to the people who lived them.”

Wyatt Earp, by Andrew C. Isenberg (Hill & Wang)This careful account intends to separate fact from the many fictions surrounding the “Frontier Marshall.” Many of these fictions originated with Earp himself, in two authorized biographies that became fodder for numerous Hollywood fables. Isenberg’s Earp is not a hero but a scalawag, flitting from one cow town to the next, and surviving by gambling, horse-thieving, pimping, embezzling, and policing. That law enforcement was open to a man who’d been arrested several times demonstrates the moral fluidity of a time when a burgeoning middle class needed the protection of whatever policemen it could get. As Isenberg shows, the two skills for which Earp was renowned—fisticuffs and gunslinging—were equally valuable when breaking and when upholding the law. To the dismay of his fellow-citizens, Earp the lawman frequently turned vigilante killer. But this became a main source of his appeal to audiences in the nineteen-twenties, who delighted in “the righteousness of the justice he administered at the muzzle of a gun.”

The Wet and the Dry, by Lawrence Osborne (Crown)In this travelogue, a proud and perceptive drinker imbibes his way around the globe, with particular emphasis on the Muslim world. In Islamic countries from Turkey to Malaysia, he tries to make sense of a culture of prohibition while undertaking such stunts as searching out a cold bottle of champagne in Oman on New Year’s Eve. At times, Osborne is a bit too pleased with his blasphemy, but he is an astute and sympathetic observer of figures ranging from the devout young teetotallers he meets in Java to winemakers in Egypt and vodka distillers in Pakistan, dedicated craftsmen at odds with the increasing conservatism of their respective countries. Though mostly fair-minded, he is at no point a likely convert, to either Islam or abstention. Instead, this book, purportedly about drying out, is really an ode to the civilizing effects of alcohol. Of the drinker, Osborne writes, “He just needs a little quiet music, and a gentle freedom from priests.”

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